Recipe: How to make your ruby version and gemset more visible when using rvm

I recently started using rvm for all of my projects. rvm is designed to help ruby developers work with multiple versions of ruby on their system. I recently came up with a great way always knowing with version of ruby is in use by rvm. But before I go into that, let’s talk about some details about rvm.

Installing a few rubys

Once you get rvm installed, you only need to run rvm install 1.9.2. That command will download and build the latest version of ruby 1.9.2 from source. If you also work with Phusion’s ruby enterprise edition, you can install it from source by running rvm install ree.

After running those two commands, you will have three versions of ruby installed on your computer, the system version, ruby 1.9.2 and ruby enterprise edition. However, if you run ruby --version you’ll notice that the system version is the one that is getting executed. Here’s what doing so looks like on my Mac running Mac OS X version 10.6.6.

However, if you first run rvm use 1.9.2, the running ruby --version should give you exactly what you expect. Try switching to ruby enterprise edition with rvm use ree. Again, running ruby --version should confirm that the switch took place correctly. Should you want to return to using your system’s version of ruby, just execute rvm use system.

If you ever need to check which version of rvm is active, you can run rvm current. This will output the name of the ruby that rvm has setup. We’ll discuss a better way to determine which ruby is active a little later. But first, let’s talk about how rvm helps us manage gems for each project.

Working with gemsets

Since just having different versions of ruby is not enough, rvm also gives us the ability to create different sets of gems that are completely isolated from each other. By default each version of ruby that we install gets its own gemset. We also have the ability to create named gemsets.

We create gemsets with the command rvm gemset create gemset_name. This will create a gemset for the currently selected version of ruby. One thing to keep in mind is that creating a gemset does not automatically switch you to that gemset. To do that you’ll need to use the rvm use command, for example rvm use 1.9.2@gemset_name. If you need to figure out which gemset is active, you can run the rvm currrent command. Once again, a better way to keep track of this is on it’s way.

Here’s a longer example that shows how to create and work with gemsets.

Start using .rvmrc, and stop thinking

To make it impossible to forget which of your projects are using which versions of ruby and even then which gemsets, rvm will look for a .rvmrc in each directory that you switch into with the cd command.

To answer that question, let’s take a peek inside of ~/funkyness/.rvmrc.

rvm 1.8.6@funkyness --create

With that one line, rvm will switch to ruby version 1.8.6 and gemset funkyness. It will even create it for you if it does not exist.

Since this feature could potentially be used to trick you into running malicious code on your system, rvm asks you to trust a .rvmrc file the first time that it reads it. You only have to do this once however.

What’s this post about again?

Now that I’ve explained the finer points about using rvm, I can finally start to vent a little.

I have several ruby projects that I’m working on at the moment. Some are for fun, but most are for my paying clients. I only recently started using .rvmrc files, and I’ve yet to create them for all of my projects. This means that for some projects, I don’t really need to think about which version of ruby is getting run, because it is the version that I’ve specified in the .rvmrc file. For other projects, however, I need to remember to run rvm use with the correct version of ruby for that project.

But I’d hate to run rvm use if I don’t need to. And running rvm current all them time seems a little silly. The solution that I’ve come up with is to alter the bash prompt to always let me know the current version of ruby that is in use by rvm.

To get started I used my favorite search engine to see if someone had already tackled this problem. I found one really good example that even introduced some color, however it was also using some git magic to include the current branch on the prompt. A few modifications later, I came up with my own version that just displays the ruby that is in use by rvm, and it does so while looking like it was copied and pasted out of Textmate.

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on Friday, January 28th, 2011 at 2:08 am and is filed under .
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